PackitUp - Meet your future Travel Buddies

We are stoked to be able to welcome you to our first official PackitUp blog post.

Why not use it to tell you a little bit about who we are, what we do and what our ambitions with PackitUp are? After all, this has been an exciting and demanding project so far and we might even disclose some of our plans for the future in here. Let’s see how it goes!

To make it short and precise, PackitUp is a mobile application to find travel buddies all around the globe. But let’s skip the elevator pitch, concept descriptions and technical stuff for now and go back a little bit.

Say hi to Amalie and Max, who in late 2015 got together for the first time to talk about an app where you could get together with other travellers, find travel buddies and discover new places, basically our own idea of a travel app. Both of us are enthusiastic travellers with a knack for techy stuff, so why not combine the two and see if there is interest in a(nother) travel app? We wanted to do things differently though.

The rough, really rough, concept originated sometime in 2014, somewhere in the middle of Texas, where I was crossing the desert for days. Our car always half empty and without proper planning of what could be done out there, we were a little lost. Over the following year I tried to come up with a plan of how to design a travel app that gets rid of that problem. Basically, meet other travellers and see awesome places. Anywhere in the world.

This is where Amalie comes in, the person who we have to thank that we all can download PackitUp today on our phones. We spent a long time taking the concept apart, dismissing things that just didn’t make sense and improving the idea until she made a deal with the travel gods and got granted a lot of app code (I’m guessing this is how app development works, no clue, go ask her).

We went through all the classic stages of a start-up, from proof of idea trough proof of concept to proof of business, constantly looking for all sorts of constructive criticism and input.

PackitUp has since been part of several incubators and start-up centers in Copenhagen, constantly improving, developing, networking and trying to deliver a travel app, which we, the users, can enjoy and actually use for improving our travel experience.

If you want to know more about what’s going on in the entrepreneurial scene in beautiful Copenhagen, check out this blog post about the start-up scene in the Danish capital.

So now, as of today, there are more than 3300 travellers going on over 1000 trips using PackitUp as their travel app, finding awesome travel buddies all over the globe.

The motivation to do this comes from the desire to really create something that all of us can use to improve our travels. We want to deliver the best app possible to the users (where we include ourselves) and challenge ourselves to come up with innovative ways of doing that.

Now, if you’ve downloaded PackitUp on either iOS or Android you will see that it is all based on a map where you see trips. This is backed up by traveller profiles and a chat. And I’ll tell you some of our internal plans now, as promised above. And this is not going to be valid forever, but we are currently working hard on widening our user base, after all a social network is determined by the people using it. We of course track and work on the bugs in the app, and we know that they are there, but we also plan for implementing more stuff. Here’s a preview: Better trip descriptions, better profiles and better map usage (think images and group functions).